Saturday, January 30, 2010

More on monoprinting

As promised a bit more info on monoprinting.

There are two ways of monoprinting, one is to paint an image with inks onto a sheet of glass or acrylic, lay your paper on top, press down with a roller or just your hands and take a print. The other is to roll out a flat layer of ink on glass or acrylic, lay a sheet of paper onto it and draw with a pencil or sharp object onto the paper, it will pick up ink from the glass on the other side of the paper. This gives you a black line on white paper. If you're quickbefore the ink dries you can get a second print off the glass - the negative, white lines on black. It can help to dampen your paper to pick up more ink and get a better print on this second try. Thin paper like rice paper is ideal.

This is the proper way, but of course I'm doing the quick version with whatever I have to hand! Instead of a glass sheet I've been using a piece of shiny cardboard - even the waxy surface of a cereal box would probably do. Instead of slow drying printing inks I've been using acrylic paint with some retarder mixed in which I brush onto the cardboard plate rather than roll. I like the liveliness of the brushmarks and in a way it combines both approaches into one.

On other matters...to round up for January! I sent off a poem to the NT Lit Awards - my submission for January. I'm aiming to send off something each month, which hopefully will be do-able.

Last weekend we ate salad with 3 tiny raddishes - the entire harvest from those seedlings I showed you a month ago! My partner and kids found this laughable and asked for a magnifying glass to find them on their plates!! This didn't stop me from feeling proud of myself...well at least it's a step in the right direction.